The new issue of StoryHack Magazine #4, the magazine of neo-pulp action and adventure stories, is out now and contains my western novelette, "Wild Yellow!"

Inside this issue:

HawkeMoon (fantasy)
by Sidney Blaylock, Jr.
The captain of the King’s Guard vows to kill the assassin after the death of the King. There’s only one problem: it turns out she may not have been the killer.
Island Rescue (thriller)
by Spencer E. Hart
College-age Frank Mason accompanies his father to the private island of a reclusive billionaire and his lovely, yet lonely daughter. When armed men storm the house, what can they do to rescue their fathers?
Beyond the Temple of Baktaar (adventure)
by Jason Restrick
Three years ago, Sam Walters emerged from those ruins, alone, unable to discover what had happened to his friend. Now, as he fights in the trenches of France during World War 1, a mysterious apparition in the night hands him his friend’s journal.
Wild Yellow (western)
by Brandon Barrows
Clint Hagar never encountered a foe he couldn’t beat with bullets or fists – until he met the desert, alone and afoot. And though he survived, something inside of him has broken and he must now battle both his own fear and self-doubt while trying to protect a small, isolated town from the outlaws who terrorize it.
My Foe Outstretched (sci-fi)
by Misha Burnett
In a future world two men fight a duel in the ruins under the city. The rules are simple–two men enter the tunnel, one man leaves.
Alpha Equation (sci-fi)
by Julie Frost
A young werewolf, an abusive alpha, and a new pack–in space.
The Bouncer’s Tale (crime)
by Jon Mollison
Trapped in a life as muscle for a crime syndicate, Robert “Bomber” Robinson struggles to maintain his humanity during the second worst night of his life.
Retirement Plan (sci-fi)
by John M. Olsen
A retired military veteran settles down on a distant planet away from his old life only to find that violence is a universal trait. Old habits resurface as he is forced to step up and defend his neighbors.
The Spirit of St. George (fantasy)
by Damascus Mincemeyer
In an alternate 1922, a biplane squadron must engage in aerial combat with dragons that are ravaging the American Rockies.

​Get yours today!

I've read a number of Charles Williams novels, but the first I read is still my favorite. I've been thinking about A TOUCH OF DEATH and how I need to reread it soon. So it seems like a good time to revisit it here, too.

New fiction out this week - a rural noir crime story I'm very proud of called "Above Water," published by TOUGH.

​Check it out at the link above or click here!

And please let me know your thoughts! I personally think it's one of my best pieces of crime fiction, but I'll let you be the judge.

Over the weekend, I ran into someone I hadn't seen in a while and we got to talking. Somehow, we got around to books and then novelizations of films, which this person didn't know was a thing. (It barely is, anymore, but I digress).

I started thinking about some of my favorites, almost all of which are by Alan Dean Foster, the king of film novelizations (at least as far as I'm concerned).

One of the first of his I read was the novelization of one of my favorite films: ALIEN.

If you've seen the movie, and why haven't you if not, you know what this is about. The plot doesn't deviate in any meaningful way from the film's, aside from including a couple scenes cut from the film version (such as the goodbye scene between Ripley and Dallas, for example, which made its way back in on one of the 21st century director's cuts), and the derelict ship's pilot being absent. What I found it interesting, though, was that Foster added a single eye (or eye-like structure, as he called it) to the face-hugger's description. While reading the novelization, I at first imagined this merely to be a mistake on the part of the narrator, but when I thought about how they're depicted in the films, there's simply nothing that could be construed as being an eye of any sort, so I suppose that's simply Foster's take on the creatures. Additionally, the fully-grown alien has eyes, confirming this being how Foster saw them in his mind, which in the scene where Brett dies, he momentarily mistakes for Jones's eyes glowing in the darkness. Foster also mentions suction cups on the creature's undersides, used to attach itself to Kane. This I honestly found kind of silly compared to the way the things attach themselves in the films. 

These are all things, however, that I imagine Foster used either from his own imaginings of written descriptions given to him, or perhaps from early concept artwork for the film - which of course went through many iterations before settling on the versions we saw on film. I'm glad that the final film versions did not have eyes, however, as frankly, it's far more chilling to see that shiny, blank skull "peering" at the camera and/or characters, than "giant, glowing yellow" eyes would be.

What surprised me was the tone of the novel - maybe it's the period in which it was written, or maybe Foster's own sensibilities, but the horror is decidedly absent, compared to the film. The tone, instead, is the sort of dry, by-the-books sci-fi you'd expect of 1950s/60s commercial science fiction prose. A lot of acronyms we're never given the meanings of, a lot of description of step-by-step actions taken by the crew as they perform specific tasks on the ship. Maybe it's meant to add realism, but while it works in a film, it really bogs down the narrative in prose, as it takes you out of the story and makes the reader feel like an uninformed observer who's suddenly become aware they don't belong on the Nostromo's bridge. The scene-changes, where the film frequently flicks back and forth between various crew-members, are badly handled, too, taking the reader out of the story - rather than line breaks (of which the novel has only one), the next paragraph will simply be focused on a different person in a different place. It was jarring.

In addition, the novel feels unbalanced in terms of the "acts" it's divided into. We're 110 pages into the book before Kane is back aboard the ship and placed in the autodoc and another sixty pages before the chest-burster (which has limbs, in this, as opposed to the worm-like appearance in the film) makes its appearance, by which point the book had begun to feel like it was dragging. The remainder of the plot plays out in less than a hundred additional pages, but contrary to feeling rushed, it actually feels lethargic - as if very little is happening and it's being padded out. That is, until we get to the final climactic scenes where the last of the crew--save Ripley--is killed and Ripley makes her escape - all of which, including Ripley's finally besting the xenomorph, is crammed into the last ten pages of the book. It's just badly-balanced plotting.

All of this sounds like a lot of complaining--and it is--but don't get the impression that I hated the novel, because I didn't. It wasn't as good as the film, but it was interesting to take a look at the story from a different perspective and in a different fashion. If I'd never seen the film before reading the novel, however, this book probably wouldn't have enticed me to watch it - so I'm glad it happened the other way around.

StoryHack Magazine revealed the table of contents for issue #4, due out in August, and it includes my western (long) novelette, "Wild Yellow."

Here's the full ToC:

Should be out the first week of August according to the publisher. I'll post more as soon as it's out.

I wrote this way back in 2017 and somehow, never posted the text, only the image. Well, better late than never, so here we go!

Last week [some time in December, 2017), I read BLACK FRIDAY, by David Goodis, a today nearly-forgotten novelist whose only work I'd previously read was also his first and most famous, DARK PASSAGE, which is probably better remembered as the film adaptation, a Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall vehicle, though the novel itself is great.

​Anyway, I saw BLACK FRIDAY and gave it a try. So what did I think?

A bit of an oldy at this point, but still a goody. This book just amuses the heck out of me.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone!

Generally, these novels follow the same pattern: an American man abroad, almost inevitably a veteran of WWII or Korea, involved in a high-stakes adventure involving international crime or sometimes very high-stakes politics (revolutions in South America and Africa are the most common). Sometimes, he's the criminal, sometimes he's trying to stop the criminal - but it doesn't really matter  because the result is the same, either way. The hero nearly always comes out on top, with his skin intact and usually with the girl and the loot, as well.

These novels, while entertaining in their way, are the macho equivalent of high-camp. Some of them are kind of ridiculous, actually. Every woman is stunning, every situation is deadly or sexy, every foe is impossible to overcome and yet the hero is always able to squeak by somehow.

The set-up fits the pattern to a T: man wrongfully convicted of a murder flees the US. With no money and no skills to fall back on besides his army sniper training, he agrees to assassinate a South American dictator for a group of revolutionaries. The difference is in how it's all handled. The main character is very detached at the beginning, thinking of it only as a means to get back to the US and clear his name (by using the money to hire the best lawyer he can find), but somewhere along the way he becomes more invested in this revolution than most of the revolutionaries and the insight into the way his mind changes is fascinating as it's quite subtle. The actual prose can be ponderous at times, but the story is unusual for the genre.

At any rate, after reading this, once again I thinking about this type of novel's pattern and its origins and it hit me immediately: almost an entire generation of American men went to war in Europe and Asia, in WWII and the Korean War, then came home, most settling down to marriage, families, jobs. But even years later, in the 50s and 60s, many were still relatively young (the average age of a US serviceman in WWII was 19, I've read), and probably, let's be frank, many were probably bored as so many of us are with our own monotonous lives today. 

But unlike many of us today, many of these men had literally deadly experiences in foreign countries, places that probably seemed both foreign and familiar after years away, and a certain nostalgia probably developed - a sort of what might have been. I'm sure that these characters in the novels I've mentioned, and likely thousands of other books, were intended to be a sort of every man for that generation - a "this could have been YOU, reader" kind of thing. Of course, these readers knew that wasn't so, and most probably wouldn't want it to be so, but it's always nice to dream of adventure, right? It's certainly a lot safer than living it.

Maybe I'm off base, but this makes a lot of sense to me